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A Melksham man who had more than two-and-a-half days worth of films of children being abused stored on his laptop has been jailed for 28 months.

Peter Chorley, 46, was found with 63 hours of movies along with other still images on his computers and other storage media when police raided his home.

And almost all of the children being raped and abused in the Chorley's collection were under the age of 13, with the youngest being just two years old.

Colin Meeke, prosecuting, told Swindon Crown Court on Friday that police seized the machines, CD Roms, DVDs and an external hard drive, in a raid in October 2012.

When they examined them he said they found the material had been stored away so he could repeatedly view it.

Mr Meeke said: "Apart from the fact that they are stored to return to in various places, it is clear that there was more, but a hard drive was lost. No further action was taken over that.

"Ninety five per cent of the movies and images in the opinion of the police depict children under the age of 13, the youngest being about two.

"There are in total 431 indecent images of children but the movies, the films, in fact have a viewing time in excess of 63 hours."

Of the files uncovered by the police he said nearly 300 were movies with the remaining 154 still images downloaded over six-and-a-half years.

He also had 30 prohibited images of children and 35 of extreme pornography involving people having sex with animals.

When he was questioned he accepted he had been looking at the images but denied he had been downloading them and saving them to disk.

Chorley, of King Street, Melksham, admitted four counts of making and one of possessing indecent images of children, possessing a prohibited image of a child, and extreme pornography.

Paul Trotman said his client claimed he had been trying to research the images rather than gaining any gratification from them. He said a lot of the material was not necessarily catalogued but had just been saved when he was backing up his system.

Mr Trotman urged the court to impose a suspended sentence so he could go on a sex offenders' programme branding it 'far more onerous' than a jail term.

He said Chorley suffered from depression and walked with crutches because of eczema on his legs.

Jailing him, Judge Tim Mousley QC said: "The children in these images were very young; 95 per cent, I am told, were children under 13 and youngest, I am told, was two.

"There were moving images, a substantial quantity, over 60 hours of that and you were possessing this material over a period of seven years."

As well as jailing him he imposed a sexual offences prevention order and told him must register as a sex offender for ten years.

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